Are You Looking For Obituaries/Death Notices That You Can’t Find Online?; Try Following These Helpful Tips To Find An Obituary Not Online

One of the more frequent requests for help I receive relates to finding obituary notices. As librarians we do tend to go to our online resources for this kind of material. We often access America’s Obituaries and Death Notices, Chicago Tribune Historical Newspaper and Newspapers.com. These are databases that are available to Schaumburg Township District Library cardholders from home.

But good as we think we are with these resources, it is not uncommon for us to come up “empty” in our search for a given individual in a resource we feel where it should exist.

Of course it is possible that maybe the researcher did not have full knowledge on the individual for which an obituary is sought. Maybe the person did not die in the year the researcher thought. Maybe not even in the geographic area they thought. If these things are wrong to start the search results may simply not find that individual.

But that is another whole issue!

A colleague of mine at our library sent me a link to a nice little guideline that you can use to locate obituaries or death notices when in fact you can’t find them online by using creative methods with other “paper” trails or actions rather than just focusing on online access.

Here is a link to the website where you can find this nice little handy list of actions to take to possibly find an obituary the old-fashioned way. None of the suggestions are guaranteed to produce that elusive obituary. The suggestions just extend your chances to maybe be successful.

Take a look at it to see if some of the tips might help you uncover those elusive obits you cannot find online. You will have to revert back to non-online sleuthing.

It will take some work. Roll up your sleeves and have at it! We all want those obituaries to just pop up from our online searching. But when they don’t you need to creatively try other pre-online database methods.